1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer systems, and more particularly, to managing objects in a computing system.
2. Description of the Relevant Art
Computing systems are widely used to managing and manipulating large amounts of data. In such systems data may be represented in a variety of ways. Often times various collections of data may be identifiable as distinct units or types of data. For example, in large database systems data items may be represented as records of various types. In other systems, data may be represented as objects or various types. Irrespective of the particular way data items are represented, data items typically have particular relationships to other data items in the system. For example, in object oriented systems, objects often include references to other objects within the system. When such objects are resident in memory, these references to other objects often takes the form of references or pointers which identify locations in memory where a referenced object resides. As memory used for storing such objects may be dynamically allocated, the references themselves may be dynamically generated and typically only persist as long as the object remains in memory. Consequently, if the objects in memory are to be stored to persistent storage (e.g., a storage array) and later restored to memory, the references will no longer be valid. This is due to the fact that as the objects are restored to memory from persistent storage, memory is again dynamically generated for their storage and the references which are also dynamically generated will differ from the original references.
In view of the above, methods must be used to maintain an identification of the proper relationships between objects when the objects are stored to persistent storage and restored to memory.